Pakistan's governmentGenerals to the left of us, judges to the right

A DEBILITATING confrontation between Pakistan's army and its civilian government, a kind of slow-motion showdown that has persisted through four years of Asif Zardari's presidency, broke out into open hostilities this week. At the same time, the government is fighting a battle with the courts, which the generals hope will force Mr Zardari (seated to the left, above) and his coterie from power, thus sparing them the trouble of staging a coup. The courts' threat to the government should reach its climax in the coming week.

The legal case concerns a scandal—“memogate”—that reaches all the way up to Mr Zardari. His close confidante and former ambassador to America, Husain Haqqani, is accused of being behind an anonymous memo that made a “treacherous” offer to Washington: to rein in Pakistan's army in exchange for America's fulsome support of the civilian government.

This week the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani (seated to the right), denounced as “unconstitutional and illegal” affidavits that the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, and the heads of the army's chief spy agency, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, filed in December in connection with the memogate proceedings. Mr Gilani was furious that the testimony of the generals, which was at odds with the government's position, was lodged without consultation.

It didn't help soothe military tempers that Mr Gilani had made the remarks to a Chinese newspaper—while General Kayani was on a tour of China, perhaps Pakistan's most crucial ally. Editors at the People's Daily, incidentally, didn't dare print the interview. They know too well where the real power lies in Pakistan. It was left to the official Associated Press of Pakistan, a government mouthpiece, to relate the prime minister's incendiary comment.

The army responded by saying that Mr Gilani's remark “has very serious ramifications with potentially grievous consequences for the country”, adding that by contrast they themselves had “followed the book”.

Then for good measure Mr Gilani fired the retired general had been serving as the top bureaucrat at the defence ministry, and replaced him with a civilian loyalist. Excitable analysts saw this as a possible prelude to an attempt to sack the army chief—it was just such an action which precipitated the last coup, in 1999.

Those who suspect that the current government is about to be sent packing say that the sudden urgency is because of the elections for the senate, which are coming up in March. Mr Zardari's party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), is expected to gain a blocking majority.

But in fact a coup now is unlikely. The army has enough on its plate: a conflict against Pakistani extremists in the north-west; a resolution for Afghanistan left to stitch up; and then an apparent lack of solutions for the country's dire economic problems.

So the real action is going to happen in the courts. The memogate hearings coincide with the revival of a case even more dangerous for the government. This concerns a legal amnesty granted to the president, which the Supreme Court has already ruled to be unconstitutional. This week the court declared the prime minister to be “not honest”, and gave his government until January 16th to comply with its orders to reinitiate a dormant Swiss corruption case that had been brought against Mr Zardari or face the consequences—which include, the court says, disqualification of the prime minster or president. Also on Monday the 16th, the accuser in the memogate case, a mysterious American businessman of Pakistani ancestry, Mansoor Ijaz, is due to arrive in Pakistan to testify.

The generals and the judges will keep Mr Zardari's back to the wall. He will continue to manoeuvre on different levels to frustrate them. That means the government will remain, in effect, paralysed.